


the ballad [of bruce banner]

by oharlem



Category: The Avengers (2012), The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Genre: Bruce Banner Angst, Bruce and Hulk are a major focus, Drabble Series, F/M, Gen, M/M, and Tony too, eventual bruce/tony, from beginning of hulk and beyond, series is in sequence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-10
Updated: 2013-02-09
Packaged: 2017-11-28 19:22:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/678019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oharlem/pseuds/oharlem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These are the songs of Bruce Banner's life. These are the lyrics he listens to at night. These are the words that pour from his head. These are the stories that raise him from the dead. These are the moments all captured in time. These are the reasons which have no rhyme.</p><p>A ballad to lull the nightmares away. A ballad to see another day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. radioactive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bruce Banner was no accident. He was created for a reason.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: Radioactive by Imagine Dragons

1.

{‘I'm waking up to ash and dust  
I wipe my brow and I sweat my rust  
I'm breathing in the chemicals’}

Bruce Banner remembers when he was born. Not born in the way that society thinks of birth, not hospitals and screaming and women-- though all of those were involved-- but birth of who he is today...and the death of who he was. 

Bruce Banner remembers Betty standing, holding his hand, waiting for the serum to begin its process. He remembers winking at her and waiting for the feeling of dread to go away. He remembers the white walls turning green and the fire through his veins and his bones breaking and mending and his skin growing and shrinking all at once-- he remembers the pain. The pain in his screams, in his lungs, in his head and, most of all, he remembers the pain in Betty’s eyes.

And, coincidentally, Bruce Banner remembers why he was born. He was not born, he was not created to help, to be the super soldier the world needed as General Ross had told him. No, he was born to destroy, born to detonate-- Bruce Banner was born to run. 

Because, after all, Bruce Banner is a ticking time bomb, a grenade without the pin, and a carefully contained disease. Bruce Banner, born of chemicals and ash and dust, created from fury and rage and rust, Bruce Banner is radioactive.


	2. fade to black

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I got low. I tried to put a bullet in my mouth and the Other Guy spit it out."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: Fade to Black by Metallica

2.

{Life it seems, will fade away  
Drifting further every day  
Getting lost within myself  
Nothing matters, no one else  
I have lost the will to live  
Simply nothing more to give  
There is nothing more for me  
Need the end to set me free}

It had been five months since the Incident, since Harlem and Hulk, since his whole life had changed. It had been five months for Bruce Banner to blame himself, to run away-- five months to get to know the voice in his head. It had been five months and three times as many lives. It had been five months and twelve countries, countless cities, and nameless soldiers. It had been five months of pain and guilt and rage. Five months of mocking and taunting and screaming-- always screaming.

It had been five months and Bruce Banner was at the end of his rope. His sanity was frayed, he could hide from the world but not from himself, never himself. Five months of running did nothing when what you were running from was in your own head. 

Every day the voice growled, angry and hurt and blaming. Blaming him for Mother’s death, blaming him for the monster’s creation, blaming him for being too weak to stand up when someone needed his help. Most of all, it blamed him for the lives he had ended and the worlds he had ruined-- it blamed him for everything wrong in the universe. And Bruce listened.

The gun was cold and stark against his teeth, the metallic taste of gunpowder settled on his tongue. With closed eyes and a silent prayer, hot white filled his vision and, for a split second, he was dead, Bruce was set free. And then the world was green once again and a bullet came flying from his--the Hulk’s-- mouth into the concrete walls. 

Three dead. Fourteen injured. Five buildings destroyed. One firefight. He didn’t try to kill himself for another two weeks.

Five months, Bruce pondered, a lot can happen in five months.


	3. a photograph of you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What good is a photograph of you?  
> Every time I look at it  
> It makes me feel blue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: A Photograph of You by Depeche Mode

**3.**  
  
{What good is a photograph of you?  
Every time I look at it  
It makes me feel blue}  
  
Stuck in between the pages of his battered copy of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Bruce found an old photograph. Pasted haphazardly on the inside of a physics theory novel, he found another. Bits and pieces of his life captured on film and stilled to a single moment, all of which brought up painful memories.  
  
His mother sitting on their front porch when she was young and beautiful and unmarred by drunken abuse. Betty hunched over in the college’s library, studying in the fading evening light, looking as stunningly gorgeous as the day he met her.  
  
Bruce found three more behind his ID, in a forgotten cookie tin, and under the draft of his research on gamma rays.   
  
Him as a child standing proudly in his grade school’s cafeteria with a first place science fair project and a shiny, blue ribbon that would never get acknowledged. Brian Banner grinning at the camera while a bottle of whisky was hidden behind his back in a metallic canister.  General Ross with Betty, holding her fast to his side as if Bruce would strike at any moment to take her away.  
  
Breathing hard each time a new photograph made its way back into his life, Bruce bought a leather bound photo album from a secondhand thrift store in Karachi, Pakistan and shoved every heartbreaking memory into the book.   
  
And when he had gone three weeks without any unwarranted photographs, he shut the album, left it in his squatter’s house, and moved on to Calcutta, leaving some of the pain behind. He had hoped he would never lay eyes on the photographs again.  
  
But Bruce Banner doesn’t always get what he wants.

**Author's Note:**

> New series. Don't kill me. Bruce Banner is my favourite character out of everything in the universe. Feels will ensue.
> 
> -Misfit


End file.
